History Minutes: Eva Emery Dye

This Sesquicentennial History Minute is from the Oregon Encyclopedia, a state-wide project supported by Portland State University, Oregon Historical Society, and Oregon Council of Teachers of English, with generous support from the Oregon Cultural Trust.  This History Minute is written by Sheri Bartlett Browne.

             Eva Emery Dye, OrHi 87523

Eva Emery Dye composed what she believed were America's epic stories: the contested settlement of the Northwest Coast, the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and the

Overland Trail migrations.  Pioneering the genre of historical fiction in the Pacific Northwest, Dye adopted a style that was a curious blend of fact, fiction, biography, and romance.  Dye and her husband Charles moved to Oregon City in 1881, and she was soon chronicling the turbulent history of American Protestant missionaries and pioneers and their British fur-trading counterparts in the Oregon Country.

In 1900, she published McLoughlin and Old Oregon and two years later The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark.

Her lasting legacy, however, endured in her determination to bring her stories to life with as much detail and veracity as possible.  Few pioneer descendants were beyond her reach, and she recorded and preserved their recollections before translating them into her own epic vision.  Dye unearthed diaries and documents of the West's early explorers, as well as surviving letters and pioneer reminiscences that she donated to libraries and historical societies.

It was these indefatigable research efforts, together with her lifelong writing and enthusiastic public speaking on the western past, that made Dye a popular and respected champion of regional history and literature.